While it took me quite some time to give in and make a TikTok account, I finally pulled the trigger during lockdown. Personally, I miss Vine a ton so TikTok was the next best option.

One thing that kept me away from TikTok for so long was the bleh user interface. It’s not “confusing” but it lacks… substance, for lack of better terms. It feels almost like a wireframe that was converted to final product by a single developer.

I constantly run into minor UI snags that make the overall experience a bit tedious.

Firstly, the portrait videos are genius - considering most people refuse to shoot videos landscape. However, this leaves no breathing room to create proper containers which when combined with the “t” shaped navigation, creates a confusing flow making it easy to get lost. I solved this by scaling the video down a bit. I also moved the top pagination outside of the video’s container because the video is part of the active page, and not the other way around - unlike the other elements that overlay the video.

Secondly, the timeline scrubber was an afterthought. I remember initially wanting to scrub through videos, and not being able to. It wasn’t up until a few months ago that the feature was added. While maybe at first it wasn’t an important feature, it’s definitely an important element, especially when videos aren’t one consistent length. It helps the user determine whether they want to stick around for the entire video or not. Back to my initial claim… the timeline scrubber was an afterthought. I run into too many issues with the style and placement of the current scrubber. One, it’s way too close to the edges of the screen, making it a pain to drag. Two, the hitbox is tiny. Again, making it a pain to drag. Often times I swipe over to the user profile or trigger the sound page. Three, it acts as a divider between the video itself and the bottom navigation bar - making it easy to accidentally trigger a page you don’t won’t and also making it hard to see if you don’t know where to look.

Third and finally, the app’s UI just lacks character overall. TikTok is marketed as a fun and youthful app but it’s design language is very “boilerplate”. Nothing wrong with a simple straight forward UI, but it can convey a confusing message depending on the brand. I added some touches of color and shadows here and there to give the app some life.